Tag Archives: creativity

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The Wonderful Wooden Board

Tiny Church has a large sheet of plywood on a base, which makes it a movable wall with great flexibility of use. One side is covered in cork… actually, it’s partially covered in cork. Someone ran out of cork sheets, so the bottom has a ragged look to it.

But the other side is painted a pale yellow. When I first arrived I thought This is a little weird but I’ve used it in worship as a prayer wall, and for other random things.

Right now it’s our CROP Hunger Walk commitment board. Our CROP walk coordinator and I were talking about how hard it is to come up with new ways to inspire participation. It tends to be the same folks every year. But realistically, the number of folks who can do the walk is pretty limited.

So this year we’re using the board as a place to encourage alternate means of support. We’re posting one flyer for each walker with the person’s name at the top. On that sheet are places for people to sign up to do other tasks to support that person. Of course people can sponsor a walker with $$, but we’ve also added the opportunity to be a prayer partner for a walker, or to provide lunch for a walker on the day of the walk. (We’ve always found it a challenge to get ourselves fed between church and the walk.) I’m hoping this means that everyone from the homebound nonagenarian to the busy mother of twins plus an infant can be involved in some way.

Wooden board =  tool for ministry.

At any rate… a friend posted the following image on Facebook last night. Something like this will definitely make an appearance on the board:

What do you need today?

By the way, you can sponsor our family for the CROP walk here.

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Thursday Link Love

Oh my goodness, link love on Thursday! Why not. Emerson said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I learned that from a Nike commercial.

What a week, folks. I’ve been blasting through the book as best I can, and still hope to get it done by Thanksgiving. But here are a few things I enjoyed during my many coffee breaks:

Can Do (Maira Kalman)

I love Maira Kalman. I have her illustrated Strunk and White and it makes me happy. This piece is not new, but new to me. A hymn to America’s inventiveness.

“Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

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Behind Door Number Three (Peter Rollins)

Connecting Occupy Wall Street and our tendency to settle for the status quo.

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What Happened to Downtime? (Scott Belsky)

Soon enough, planes, trains, subways, and, yes, showers will offer the option of staying connected. Knowing that we cannot rely on spaces that force us to unplug to survive much longer, we must be proactive in creating these spaces for ourselves. And when we have a precious opportunity to NOT be connected, we should develop the capacity to use it and protect it.

I love his suggestion to “Protect the state of no-intent.”


Articles like this challenge and convict me… and also affirm that it’s a fiercely important thing to be practicing Sabbath keeping. And writing about it. Hat tip to Ruth for this one.

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Friday Link Love

A few random things…

Ice Art

 

Greenpeace got artist John Quigley to partially recreate da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on a melting ice pack near the North Pole. Nicely metaphorical, dontcha think?

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Overshoot on Your Salary Request to Get the Best Offer

With any luck, I won’t be negotiating another salary from scratch any time soon. But I was intrigued by this approach:

Asking for a ridiculously high salary—even when offered as a joke—can get you a much higher salary offer than if you stay within the typical salary range for a job, the Harvard Business Review suggests.

I’m wondering whether this approach works in other areas of life!

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Choices for Change

This is an article for church leaders on how to catalyze change, but it has good thoughts for anyone needing to make a shift in his or her life: “When you want to change, you have two choices: think your way into acting or act your way into thinking.”

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If It Feels Right…

This David Brooks column has been making the rounds among my Facebook friends:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

[more at the link]

At least one commenter suggested that people of all ages are not necessarily good at talking categorically and philosophically about moral issues… but they are still good and moral people. What do you think?

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Hope it is an excellent weekend for everyone.

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Friday Link Love

Tonight we celebrate Robert’s birthday with a trip to the Arlington Drafthouse to see this guy:

Wyatt Cenac

We’re pretty psyched.

In the meantime, here are some links to keep you busy:

Don’t Give Up: The Inspirational Letters Project

The eternal truth of a lot of creative work: 3% of the time you are on fire, and 97% of the time is a messy slog. The key: persist, despite all the difficulties…

These are letters from animators at Pixar and elsewhere to an aspiring animator… the response prompted him to start a spinoff called the Inspirational Letters Project. As you would expect, they are visually interesting.

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King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King denied the ontological divinity of Jesus, didn’t think heaven/hell were literal places, saw the Bible as myth, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus (beginning at the age of 13), rejected original sin, and more. In other words, a liberal theologian.

On that topic, I’m sympathetic with James McGrath, who laments that many of the “new atheists” are putting forth criticisms of Christianity and the Bible as if they are new and original, when in fact many theologians have been saying similar stuff for centuries, including MLK, it would seem. (I also note that the comments on McGrath’s post are largely substantive and respectful. Kudos to him.)

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Don’t Just Do Something: Stand There

 

Numerous writers, artists, poets and musicians have testified to the virtues of such idleness in their own creative lives. It was when he was completely alone, Mozart wrote in a letter, “say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when [he] could not sleep,” that his ideas flowed best and most abundantly…

Such testimony is not just plain good sense; it is good science too. In a recent article in Discover magazine, the journalist Stephen Johnson reported on a conversation with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The cognitive part of our brain works very fast, Damasio explained. “So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names in just a few hundredths of a second.” But the emotional part of our brains works very differently, and there is precious little evidence that this is going to change. Tasks that have to do with empathy and imagination, with slow-growing qualities like love and fidelity and ethics, will continue to develop in their own sweet time.

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Kurt Andersen: Our Politics Are Sick

I love Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360; it’s one of my favorite podcasts. “Creativity, pop culture and the arts”: what’s not to love?

He nails this metaphor in my opinion:

The American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders.

It’s a metaphor, but it’s not a joke. I’ve read a lot about autoimmune diseases — the literal, medical kinds, also disconcertingly on the rise — because several members of my family have them. At some point, our bodies’ own immune systems went nuts, mistaking healthy pieces of our anatomies — a pancreas, a thyroid, a joint — for foreign tissue, dangerous enemies within, and proceeded to attack and try to destroy them. It’s as close to tragedy as biology gets.

Which is pretty much exactly what’s been happening the last decade in our politics. The Truthers decided the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Others decided our black president is definitely foreign-born and Muslim. Tea Party Republicans are convinced his administration is crypto-socialist and/or proto-fascist. The anti-Shariah people are terrified of the nonexistent threat of Islamic law infecting American jurisprudence. It’s now considered reasonable to regard organs and limbs of the federal government — the E.P.A., the education department, the Federal Reserve — as tumors that must be removed. Taxation itself is now considered a parasitic pathogen rather than a crucial part of our social organism.

Brill.

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The Procrastination Flowchart

I resemble that.

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And finally, Steve Job’s 2005 Commencement Speech to Stanford. Wise and touching. I wish him well.

 

 

 

 

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Friday Link Love

A few things to enjoy/chew on:

The Art of Jim Denevan

Love the art Jim does in sand—some whimsical, some vaguely unsettling.

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In Which I Am Part of the Insurgency (Emerging Mummy)

There is a war on women, argues the author:

The battles go from the rape tactics of war in Sudan to the sex trafficking of eastern Europe, from the pervasiveness of girlie-girl hyper-sexualised stealing of childhood to the proliferation and acceptability of pornography.

I am even beginning to wonder if the evangelical culture war about “biblical” womanhood – narrow stay-at-home vs. working, from complementarian vs. egalitarian (full disclosure: unapologetic egalitarian here) – is disingenuous at best and neutering half the church at worst and, to be honest, completely missing the point. [MaryAnn: wonder no more. It is all of those things.]

If it is a war on women, I can’t be Winston Churchill. I am not the one leading the charge and very few listen to my small voice with its strong Canadian accent. I may not be a Katie Davis or a  Christine Caine or a Dorothy Day. I may not be a Nancy Alcorn, let alone a Mother Theresa or an Oprah Winfrey or any other well-known woman fighting some small or large battle in this war against our sisters, mothers and daughters, our friends. Our big voices of freedom and workers for the wholeness of women stand as the generals and governments, the tacticians and leaders are our Allied forces.

No, I am not that important. I am small. 

And my life is a bit small.

So I will be the French Resistance. 

I will be the small underground movement, the insurgency, the one taking every opportunity, however small, to strike a blow for the Kingdom’s way of womanhood.

I would like her to unpack “Kingdom’s way of womanhood,” but I really like the image of the French Resistance, the idea of being subversive in place.

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If Men Are Working Just as Much as Women, Why Do Women Still Feel Like They’re Getting the Shaft? 

Here is a discussion of a recent Time Magazine article (subscribers only) that deals with the amount of work men and women do each week. You may remember The Second Shift, published in the 1980s, that showed that women worked 15 hours more per week than their partners. Now that gap has shrunk to, basically, nothing. Men still work more hours outside the home, and women still do more housework, but the total amount of work done is the same.

So why does it still feel radically unbalanced to many women, the Time article asks? The blog post, written by a stay-at-home dad, explores some possible reasons. I will add another possibility: the work men do at their offices is “hidden”—that is, women who are working part-time, or who don’t work outside the home, don’t really see the fruits of that work on a daily basis. The fruits come in the form of a paycheck every two weeks (hopefully). By contrast, the housework is in plain view, every single day: the meals they cooked, the toilets they scrubbed. I can understand how that would contribute to a feeling that the men do “nothing around here, it’s all up to me.” Doesn’t mean it’s right.

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Amusing Ourselves to Death

A graphical comparison of the ideas of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as expressed in the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Example: ”Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.” Which vision do you think has played out more fully?

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Barna: Trends in Religion

For my clergy friends: Church volunteerism is down 8% over the past 20 years.

“And in 1991, just one-quarter of adults (24%) were unchurched. That figure has ballooned by more than 50%, to 37% today.” More at the link.

 

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Keeping Childhood Artifacts

My love for Evernote is well documented in these parts, but did you know I actually listen to the podcast? Such a geek. It’s actually quite entertaining, the guys are funny, and I learn a lot about new uses and features for Evernote. (Word count for the Mac version, pleeeeeeeease?) I also feel like I get some insight into Robert’s job, since he is a product manager for a software company and the guys talk a lot about the process of deciding what features to roll out and when.

The last podcast I listened to featured an interview with writer Susan Orlean. (I highly recommend The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.) I was nodding along as she talked about Evernote as a tool for research and writing. She then started talking about Evernote as a storage solution for her kids’ artwork—she takes pictures of stuff and stores it in notebooks so it’s all accessible and organized.

She is totally right that the sheer volume of creative output is overwhelming. What’s the opposite of a hoarder? That’s what I am. Our house lacks the storage space, and I lack the inclination, to organize and store everything they do, but nor do I relish the idea of going through their creations and judging certain ones worthy of keeping. (I love everything they do!) So… this morning I spent some time taking pictures of their artwork over the last year and sorting them into Evernote notebooks. I pictured our kids, as they age and grow up, scrolling through dozens (hundreds?) of pictures and school assignments, marveling at their progress, laughing at the misspellings and the whimsical drawings.

But even as I went through this process, I realized that something is definitely lost in storing artwork this way. There is an energy that’s present in physical artwork that doesn’t translate to the screen. Real paintings and drawings have a three-dimensionality to them—when you hold a piece of kid artwork in your hand, you can feel the brushstrokes, you can practically see the fat little fingers grasping a marker.

I think, overall, the benefits outweigh the downsides. And there were some items that were just too precious to keep in an online system (or too complicated to photograph well) that I am storing in archive boxes. But on balance, I think this is the way to go for us. A good organizational system has to be fun and easy to use, and Evernote accomplishes that. (I admire people who scrapbook, but I don’t enjoy it. I like the person who said, “I don’t scrapbook, I pile chronologically.”)

Parents, what do you do with kid artwork?

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Signs On the Road: Intergenerational Worship at Tiny Church

Our children have Sunday School during worship, following the children’s time. There are plusses and minuses to this approach, but having Sunday School during worship is a practical reality at Tiny Church. We’re tweaking this with our plans for the Upper Room. And on the fifth Sunday of each month, I plan a more kid-friendly service, including a vastly shortened sermon, plus something experiential for everyone to do together.

We’ve done a couple of different things. In May we were looking at Paul’s speech to the Athenians in Acts 17. In that speech he makes connections between the culture and the Christian faith. For that service, I said a couple of quick words about that (Oprah made an appearance in that message, as I recall!).

I had printed out letter-sized photos of things that were happening at the time (the devastation in Joplin, protests in Libya). People had been asked earlier in the service to choose one that ‘spoke’ to them. During the sermon time each person was invited to look at the photo, study it, and write in the margins of the page an idea about where God might be present in that situation. (I don’t know was an acceptable answer.) I had brought in a large board we use for posters and signup sheets and people posted them on the board with tape. It has been in a corner of our fellowship hall as an artifact of that service.

This summer we are doing a series based on a series of articles I wrote a few years ago. The series is called “Postcards from the Bible” and looks at different settings in scripture and what they might represent for us spiritually. So this summer we’ve ‘traveled without leaving the sanctuary’ as we’ve looked at the garden, the valley, the mountaintop, the desert, and so forth. Yesterday was a fifth Sunday and we were on the road.

I used the walk to Emmaus text from Luke 24. After reading the text, I talked a little about the road as a metaphor for life’s journey. I talked about the signs we see by the side of the road, and how Jesus was a sign for the men (opening the scriptures to them, walking with them as a companion) and the men provided a sign for Jesus (offering hospitality by inviting him for dinner even though he intended to keep going).

Then I played the song “You’re Aging Well” by Dar Williams (link is to a YouTube video by a fan). The song is about the negative signs that get posted along the way in our lives and the singer’s desire to paint over those signs with messages that are gracious and hope-filled.

Earlier in the service the kids had handed out paper with the lyrics on one side and a blank road sign on the other. After the song finished I asked people to write a message on their sign, some bit of wisdom that helps them get through tough times, a message of faith and hope.

After they had done this, I said that a sign is not a sign unless it is shared with others. So I invited people to stand up and trade signs. Once they’d received one they were to read it and trade with someone else. We went several rounds like this.

Then I told folks that if they’d ended up with a sign that was particularly meaningful, they could keep it; otherwise, I invited them to put it in the offering plate and we’d post them on the board in the fellowship hall, as an artifact of this service.

Tiny Church is an interesting place. I know there are people here who are very content with traditional worship. Others like creativity as long as it’s not “weird creativity”… whatever that is! And yet, with all this diversity, whenever I’ve planned something different than the usual routine, everyone participates, from the 90-year-olds on down to the children. I’m grateful for that.

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Friday Link Love

TONS of links this week!

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Grains of Sand Magnified 250 Times

Beautiful stuff. (see right, click the link for more)

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Five Ridiculously Easy Ways to Unblock Writer’s Block

I especially like “From A to B in 5 Semantic Fractures.”

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Soldier Leaves Much Bigger Legacy Than ‘He Was Gay’ — CNN

Lovely story about Andrew Wilfahrt, who is first known gay soldier killed in war since the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

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Anne Lamott: The Habit of Practice: Faith and Leadership

What do you do when perfectionism, vanity, self-loathing and projecting are wearing you down? The writer talks about what she has learned from tennis, faith and writing to deal with these “demons.”

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Looking Back and Moving Forward–Gathering Voices

I panicked in the middle of Puget Sound, breathing heavily, shaking erratically, shoveling warm pieces of salami and pecorino into my mouth before I passed out.

Erin’s post touches on a lot of the same stuff I was feeling/thinking on the mountain.

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And some audio/videos:

A “Modesty Manifesto”–David Brooks

Audio of Brooks at the Aspen Ideas Festival (how did you get that gig, BTW?). Brooks starts about 6 minutes in and deals with “modesty and how a lack of it is making it much more difficult to solve our nation’s problems.” I found myself quibbling with some of his ideas and stats but he makes a compelling case.

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Beautiful Oops–Barney Saltzberg (YouTube)

Love this whimsical book! Such a sweet way to think about the “oopses” in our lives.

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Taking Imagination Seriously: Janet Echelman (TED)

Janet’s art is luminous and beautiful and (in keeping with the link above) came out of an “oops.”

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Pete Rollins at the Wild Goose Festival

“I would love to see communities which are more like the singer-songwriter, where the liturgical space reflects our suffering in a way that we can confront our brokenness, confront our darkness, work through it, and give it the space to breathe. Because if we do not give it space, it will come out in other ways. It will come out in hatred of ourselves or hatred of others.”

We missed this presentation Sunday morning because we got on the road early. Nice to have a chance to see it. I am a hopeless Rollins groupie.

 

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Friday Link Love

Some items that caught my fancy this week:

Bumper Crop on the NYC Taxi Farm

I love the Improvised Life blog. It’s bursting with creative miscellany. This post is about cab drivers in New York who planted a garden on a little strip of space in the Bronx near the place where they wait for fares. Wonderful.

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The Daily Rind, A Better Way to Plan the Day

An interesting, graphical way to plot out the events of the day, using a circle motif instead of linear list. It’s like Daytimer Meets Mind Map. I haven’t put this technique into practice, and might not, because what I do works fine. But the other day I did find myself visualizing the day’s action items in this manner.

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On Time Travel, Love and Changing the Past

Pete Rollins does a philosophical riff on Back to the Future as only he can.

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Carrie Newcomer: Writing from the Spiritual Well

I’ve been following Carrie’s music for 15 years now, and she doesn’t give a whole lot of interviews. This is a good one. Carrie is probably responsible for my being a secret Quaker at heart.

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Disaster Tolerance

If you don’t read Seth Godin, why not? He’s always interesting, even when he’s way out there. This one could have been written for the 21st century church.

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And finally, it’s 12 days until the Wild Goose Festival, and I can’t wait. Read about it here.

It’s been an interesting few weeks. Lots of processing about life, vocation, the pastor/writing balance, etc. This internal work isn’t related to any decision per se—I really like being Tiny Church’s pastor, I feel called to it, and have no plans to leave. And I’ve got some excellent irons in the fire writing-wise. Life is trucking along, actually. Just a lot of questions swirling, turning up the earth so things can be planted. (Methinks the milestone birthday that’s looming approaching in six months is a factor.)

And as I’ve done this wrestling and contemplation, I’ve been very aware that this this festival of art *music * spirituality * justice is auspiciously timed. You might say eerily timed. The groundwork is laid. Something’s going to happen there, I just don’t know what it is. It’s exciting, but when life’s “trucking along” in a comfortable way, it’s also an unsettling feeling: “Dangit, Jesus, you’re gonna do one of Those Things You Do, aren’t you?” prayers. Eh, I hate when that happens. All you can do is buckle up.

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Friday Link Love

Some random stuff that caught my attention this week:

I Believe in Child Labour, Sweatshops and Torture

Peter Rollins is an amazingly complex thinker and communicator. But in this post he doesn’t do nuance—for which he has been criticized. Still, for many Christians who have divorced belief from practice for way too long, and in some pretty tragic ways, these are prophetic words.

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“In My Opinion”: Practices of Discernment for Leaders When Making Decisions

Here’s your nuance:

On one of my work-related trips, I struck up a conversation with a young man who was a professional pilot. He was a serious-minded guy, and before long we were discussing the big issues of life. After a while, he said he noticed that whenever I said something substantive, I always added the qualifier “in my opinion.” In his opinion, he said, someone with my academic background should not qualify his remarks but should speak “with certainty.”

I explained that my degrees have provided me with more questions than answers. He said, “I’ll have to think about that.”

I thought about it, too. And I stick by my qualifier.

The article offers some antidotes to what the author calls “arrogant absolutism.”

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The Men in Mentors

The author went looking for female mentors… and couldn’t find any.

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And a bit more whimsy:

Solutions for the ‘Everyday’

Two-way toothpaste? Coffins that screw into the ground? I love it!